Toronto's MAGIC BBS, 1993

Once upon a time -- let's say 1993 -- there was an Internet, but no one knew about it. If you wanted to go online you probably asked your computer to telephone an electronic bulletin board system (or BBS) using a little box called a modem.

A BBS was something like a Web site; it usually contained information and connected you to other people. But because you had to make a telephone call to access it, a BBS was also clearly situated geographically somewhere, and only a few people could use it at the same time. At that time the connection of one smart thing to another was not automatic, but mysterious and wonderful and a little scary.

In 1993 I was reading Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg and thought, This is interesting, so I spent way too much money on long distance data calls to hacker BBSes all over North America. It was amazing fun. This was not my first time exploring BBSes; I had been using them since 1985 in Halifax, pioneering flame wars and useless discussions. I was cyber, let me tell you.

In those days one BBS could link to another, sometimes through some sort of store-and-forward network, but also by listing the phone numbers of other BBSes, most in the local area, a few far away. One could sort of hop from one BBS to another that way, connecting to different people in different cities. It was a novel feeling of moving through virtual space, and very much like the feeling I had moving through the Internet before there was a Web.

I don't remember how I found MAGIC, but it was different from the other BBSes I had visited. It had a graphical interface through special client software called FirstClass, but most of all, MAGIC had community. You could chat with dozens of people in real time, there were moderated discussion forums, and the place seemed filled with smart and interesting people. I can still remember the feeling of logging on and connecting to MAGIC; I was back to being the small town boy reaching out to my idealized city full of interesting people and things.

I was only on MAGIC for a few weeks when I proposed the creation of the Electronic Frontier forums to Mark Windram, Apple employee and BBS visionary. Mark said yes, and I pumped the forums full of good stuff. After MAGIC "crashed" and we lost everything (I think Mark wanted to do a reset, actually) we had new forums: the Internet Café and the CyberForum. That tells you how quickly the ideas around this stuff were changing back then: we went from the frontier to a cafe in a little over four months.

I got to know some remarkable people -- Cory, Shauna, Mark, the Doctors -- but they were relationships that for all their intensity I had trouble translating offline. Those connections, friendly and disagreeable both, flamed dazzlingly bright. Online communication seems to create the illusion of intimacy: words are what sparks it, and your brain fills in the rest, like a radio drama or some favourite book. MAGIC threw us all into this world of immediate text, something beyond text that we are now living with everyday.

My education in these things was awkward. I didn't know I was talking different, that the closeness had to be renegotiated offline, or that what she said across the restaurant table could sound so different spoken instead of written. It all seemed so important at the time, even the flame wars.

For all its impact on me and others, there isn't anything of MAGIC left anymore. It lasted for months, not even years. Mark took it commercial in 1994 and it didn't work. Part of it was that the BBS, as a way to share information and connect to the world, was getting swept away by the Internet. And online community was changing from something geographic to something that didn't have to be, so the twine that kept the thing together came apart.

Now we have the Web and Metafilter and so on, but once, out on that frontier, we had MAGIC.

John Harris Stevenson, 2003